Increasing Your Laptops Performance

Is your laptops performance to say the least SLOW?

There are many things you can do to increase the performance of your laptop on both a software and hardware level.

Software
Defragment hard drive
Run disk diagnostics
Tune your operating system for performance
Turn off or disable unneeded hardware resources

Setup a Custom page file
Disable power saving when on mains/AC power
Clean up the registry
Disk clean up to remove all temp files
Uninstall or remove any unused applications
Check for spyware, viruses and any other malware
Recreate your Windows profile
Lower screen colors

Hardware

Increasing RAM is an easy way to increase your laptops performance, a 32 bit version of Windows will support up to 3.5gb of RAM and upgrading from 1 to 3gb of RAM can dramatically increase the performance of your laptop .

Upgrading the Processor will give a huge boost to your laptops performance , however upgrading a processor especially in a laptop is not a task the average user should attempt, there are lots of points to consider such as, processor compatibility, power requirements, cooling and how to actually access/replace the old processor.

Changing the hard drive for a faster model will allow files to be accessed and written faster, plus it will also mean a faster page file for virtual memory.

Software

Defragment hard drive – Defragmenting the hard drive will ensure all files are contiguous and only stored in one location as opposed to being broken down and stored in 2 or 3 locations,  this then means faster load times as files will only need to be loaded or saved to or from one location, a great way to increase the performance of your laptop .

Run disk diagnostics such as CHKDSK /R every week or so to ensure that Windows does not have any issues with your hard drive.

Tune your operating system for performance by turning off any of the extra Windows eye candy .

Turn off or disable unneeded hardware resources after all what’s the point in having resources enabled that you’re never going to use, this can include modems, PCMCIA slots .

Setup a custom page file to help increase yours laptops performance .

Disable power saving when on mains/AC power - Many laptops are set as a default to not use full power and allow resources such as hard drives to go into power saving, this can be changed from Control Panel and Power Options

Clean up the registry – Did you know the Windows registry grows and can easily become bloated slowing down the performance of your laptop .

Disk clean up to remove all temp files – Windows can quickly build up an excess of temp files, but luckily it has a great little utility which will increase your laptops performance as its removes all temp files, it’s called the disk clean up wizard, to use this right click on your C drive, Select properties and under general you will see Disk Cleanup

Uninstall or remove any unused applications – An unused application means wasted disk space, and an excess of wasted space, also many applications still run something as a service which does use a small amount of system resources, both of these can contribute to slower performance of your laptop .

Check for spyware, viruses and any other malware – Always a biggie, not only can spyware or viruses be detrimental to the performance of your laptop , but they can also completely trash your operating system, so although it’s important to have Antivirus and Antimalware installed and run frequently make sure you set scan times during a quiet work period for yourself, otherwise a scan running can really inhibit your laptops performance .

Recreate your Windows profile – After using a computer for a period of time your Windows profile can become very large, not only due to stored files such as documents, but also due to other temp files, application install files etc, so recreating your Windows profile is an easy way to improve the performance of your laptop .

Lower screen colors – Many computers run with screen colors set at 32bit, but the difference between this and 16bit is very small when looking at images, setting to 16bit can help to improve the graphics performance of your computer, to access the display properties Right Click on the desktop and select Properties or Personalize

How much ram is enough how does ram affect your laptops performance ? Too little RAM and your computer will crawl along regardless of how powerful it is, too much RAM and much of it will be wasted, what is the ideal amount?

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